Dreaming of a better work culture?
Our corporate workplaces are toxic, and we don’t know how to talk about it. Dreams have the power to wake us from the nightmare.
I was plagued by a recurring nightmare for three months. I’m floating in a lush green meadow. Ahead of me, a brown hare hops along the path. I slow down, sensing he would be startled by my approach. Together we wander through the field, a few meters distance between us. Then, disaster. Young men jump out, surround him, angry and destructive. I run to save my hare, but every night I’m too late.
Talking about dreams is unprofessional.
It’s perfectly acceptable to discuss sleep at work. More than that, its positively encouraged. Mathew Walker published Why We Sleep in 2017. His best-seller launched our obsession. We know that sleep boosts productivity, engagement, collaboration, and health. Employee wellbeing is declining, and financial pressures are mounting. Organizations are seizing this magic pill. Google and Nasa led the way in sleep strategies. Endless business articles urge others to follow. Modern offices wouldn’t be complete without at least one nap room.
“Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient, there is sickness and disease.” — Mathew Walker
We’re happy to share the details of our bed-time routines with colleagues. The importance of an evening run. The evils of late-night screen time. The convenience of meditations apps. What we won’t ever tell, what would seem intensely intimate, is our experiences once our eyes close. Dreams, we’ve silently agreed, are unprofessional.
Dreams reveal who you are, without filter, whether you want to hear it or not. More importantly, dreams tell us who we are. Awake, at the office, we are most definitely individuals. Once we slip into dreamworld, things get a little blurrier. Because our dreams are bizarre, we assume they are unique. But many people have remarkably similar ones. Dreams reflect not only our own fears and desires, but those of our community. If culture is what people do when they think no one’s looking, then a dream is the Peeping Tom at the window.
We can insist on keeping dreams out of the workplace, but we can’t keep work out of our dreams. Most of us dream about our jobs 20% of the time, even after we retire. If we spend long hours at work, we’ll dream about it even more. When we’re stressed at the office, this colors the emotions of our dreams. A happy work-life means pleasant work-dreams.
Dreams reflect our shared experiences.
When Covid-19 hit four years ago, our waking lives ground to a halt. Our dream lives, in contrast, went into overdrive. Psychologists and dreamers congregated to understand why. The website Idreamofcovid.com stands as an archive of this strange time. Unified by a shared threat, our dreams synced up. Insect attacks and faceless strangers haunted our collective unconscious. It was an era characterized by cutting edge scientific technology. Still, we reverted to the ways of our ancestors. Gathering around a (virtual) fire to make sense of the storm. Dreams were our shared language.
Dreams tell us things about our world that we might not be consciously aware of. In The Third Reich of Dreams, Charlotte Beradt describes the dreams of Berliners during the rise of Nazism. The themes are consistent, foreshadowing much of the horror to come. Mind control, invasive bureaucracy, chanting crowds.
“The dreamer can recognize deep down, what the system is really like.” — Bruno Bettelheim
Outside times of trauma, less is known about how our dreams reflect culture. We share our nighttime experiences in huge numbers. But only anonymously, behind laptops. Online dream repositories, message boards, and more recently AI tools, hoard digital echoes of our secret stories. But to make sense of the dreams, we need to come together and be seen. To learn what they are telling us about our culture, we need each other. Specifically, we need the insights and context of people who we live and work alongside.
Dreams tell us about workplace culture.
The desire to define, and then to optimize, workplace culture is growing fast. One in ten of us work in a toxic culture. People Analytics Experts round up every source of data they can find. Slack messages, wearable fitness trackers, quarterly surveys. All are fed to the hungry algorithm. Leaders are desperate to know what their employees think. But they have neglected the most revealing informant. Almost fifty years after Ullman’s first dream-sharing group, the royal road to the unconscious hasn’t reached the workplace.
In Oracle of the Night, Sidarto Ribeiro recounts the dream of a 28-year-old professional women. She had spent some time studying and exploring new ideas. She was preparing to return to her regular job. She dreamt she had gone back to middle-school. In the dream she was resentful that she had to wear a uniform instead of her preferred golden sneakers. Her unconscious mind succinctly summarized the suffocating conformity of her work culture. In the waking world, could she have done the same? And if she could, would she have told anyone?
During Covid-19, employee listening activities ramped up. In general, the efforts paid off. Good organizations heard what the workforce needed, and often, responded. With the gift of hindsight, we now see that something fell through the net. Gender equality in careers was set back by the pandemic. With the family trapped in the house all day, women took on the extra burden of childcare. If we had been talking about dreams, we would have seen the problem. Women had almost twice as many sad or angry dreams. They had regular anxiety dreams about homeschooling. The emotion of men’s dreams didn’t change.
My nightmare about the brown hare began soon after my company announced restructuring. My role was one of many at risk. If you would have asked me at the time, I would have told you I loved my job and was coping well with the change. Indeed, I filled two employee surveys with those positive sentiments. As always, my subconscious knew better. In an environment without security, it felt too dangerous to be creative. My desire for space to grow was metaphorically stomped on.
If I was the only one having these dreams, then who cares? It's a vaguely interesting anecdote. Or maybe a disclosure better suited to a therapist's couch. But I suspect that wasn’t the case. My colleagues were living through the same experience. What tales were their unconscious weaving? About psychological safety, personal growth, innovation? If we were connected, could we have used this medium to describe and improve our culture? Or at least to have felt less alone in it.
Dreams never give up on us. They are with us every night urging us to face the issues that restrict and discourage us, or that limit our inventiveness- Montague Ullman
In case you’re worried about my brown hare, don’t be. I took back control, changed my job, and saved us both.
The hare was ahead of me on the meadow path. The men appeared as usual. I rushed; with the stomach lurching dejection I had learned from previous nights. My hare was alone on the grass, bloody but alive. As is common in dreams, when I reached out, he transformed. I cradled a fat, whimpering, orange cat. I sang to him, and he purred.
